TELL ME A RIDDLE:CLASS AND GENDER RIVALRY IN MERIDEL

LE SUEUR AND TILLIE OLSEN

Constance Coiner

Writers Meridel Le Sueur and Tillie Olsen span two generations of

radical women, those affiliated with the Old Left and those who

came of age with the New Left and the most recent women's move-

ment. One of the salient features of the 1930s was the failure of

any leftist organization to develop women's militance into a self—

conscious feminism. Yet in more or less covert ways, Le Sueur and

Olsen's literature from the late '20s and '30s anticipates the concerns

of feminists a generation later. We see in their texts a prescient if

latent consciousness. During the '30s Le Sueur and Olsen's litera-

ture was considered "proletarian," the term generally reserved for

working—class literature produced during the Depression decade.

Few scholars have examined American working—class litera-

ture since its flourishing in the 1930s. Since then, working—class liter-

ature has been generally considered crudely tendentious and aesthet-

ically inferior to bourgeois literature. Impatient with this assump-

tion, Paul Lauter points out that the American literary canon has

ILHA DO DESTERRO, No. 23, 29-Semestre de 1990, p. 75 a 97.

76 TELL ME A RIDDLE

been defined by a privileged elite, primarily males of Anglo—Saxon

or northern European origin. My approach implicitly supports the

effort of Lauter and others (national minorities, women, radicals) to

expand the canon and to examine the aesthetic and political bases

on which it is constructed. 1 But my approach is also based on the

premise that moments of textual "inferiority" or "weakness" may

be historically resonant, sometimes suggesting more about a given

historical period than those moments which formalist critics might

consider evidence of aesthetic excellence. A piece of working— class

literature, as any form of discourse, displays conflicting and contra-

dictory meanings. The critic's task is not to repair or complete the

text but to identify the principle of its silences, "flaws," conflicted

meanings. In Le Sueur and Olsen's '30s literature, the principle lies

in their response to the American Communist Party (CP), an orga-

nization to which they were deeply committed.

On the Communist Left,"proletarian" and "manly" were near-

ly synonymous; the worker—protagonist in proletarian literature "al-

most by definition was male"; and "proletarian prose and criticism

tended to flex their muscles with a particularly masculinist pride"

(Rosenfelt 395). The androcentrism of Communist literary policy re-

flected that of the CP as a whole. Party organizing during the early

'30s, for example, focused on the workplace, when only about 20 per-

cent of women worked outside the home, and throughout the decade

Party union activity centered on mining, steel, maritime, and auto,

Constance Coiner 77

industries in which few women were employed. The Party at least

tacitly endorsed the traditional sexual division of labor, and domes-

tic issues, when they counted at all, were not a priority. Two exam-

ples from the Left press suggest the obstacles Party women faced.

The first is a quote from Michael Gold, who in the late '20s and

early '30s was one of the most influential editors of New Masses,

the CP's literary journal; at the 1935 American Writers' Congress

Gold was hailed as the best—loved American revolutionary writer.

This quote, from an essay titled "America Needs a Critic," exem-

plifies what Lauter and Alice Kessler—Harris have termed the Left's

"hairy— cheated" polemics:

Send us a critic. Send us a giant who can shameour writers back to their task of civilizing America.Send a soldier who has studied history. Send a strongpoet who loves the masses, and their future.... Sendone who is not a pompous liberal, but a man of thestreet.... Send no coward. Send no pedant. Send us aman fit to stand up to skyscrapers.... Send no saint.Send an artist. Send a scientist. Send a Bolshevik.Send a man (my emphasis). (9)

A second example actually derives from an official publication

of the CIO, the CIO News, but would not have been out of place

in the Party press. The passage describes "The Sweetheart of the

CIO":

... "a good union girl" should only work to supportherself or her family, be intelligent, a good house-

78 TELL ME A RIDDLE

keeper, and shorter than her boyfriend. She shoulduse makeup moderately and keep her stocking seamsstraight. She should go out on the picket line "withher man," because having "girls come on the line...puts more pep in the gas." Although she should listenwith interest when a man wants to talk about hisunion, she mustn't ever "try to get bossy." (cited byStrom 371)

Le Sueur and Olsen were at once loyal CP members and

emerging feminists, and their literature variously strains toward and

away from Party prescriptions, evincing conflicting impulses which I

term "official" and "unofficial."Their texts address the physiological

and sexual experiences that shape women's lives—sexual initiation,

pregnancy, childbirth, miscarriage, sterilization, battery, rape—at

a time when these topics seldom appeared in literature, including

working-class literature. Olsen and Le Sueur's texts implicitly ques-

tion orthodox Marxism's primacy-of- production theory and its con-

comitant privileging of the workplace and the industrial worker at

the loci of struggle. During the '30s the Party generally charac-

terized psychological and emotional categories as unmaterialist, as

unrelated to "real" politics, labeling introspective novels as febrile,

self- indulgent, and bourgeois. Despite this, Le Sueur and Olsen

made familial relations, emotional deformation, and the developing

consciousness of children the central subjects of their literature. At

points their texts burst their own formal and political limitations,

momentarily overcoming the restraints of the very revolutionary or-

ganization that fostered them. Le Sueur and Olsen's texts provide a

Constance Coiner 79

wedge into history, a glimpse of the Communist Left not otherwise

available to us.

One of the most prominent women writers of the '30s, Le

Sueur endured redbaiting, blacklisting, and 25 years of obscurity to

become in the '70s a regional folk heroine and nearly an archetypal

figure within the women's movement. As old as the Twentieth Cen-

tury, Le Sueur was born in 1900 in rural Iowa, into a white, middle-

class, and educated family. She has written extensively about her

maternal grandmother, Antoinette Lucy, a stern "third—generation

Puritan" and "one of the first settlers, gun in hand, of the Ok-

lahoma territory" (Hedges 2). Le Sueur's vivid memories of her

grandmother, so full of the woman's courage and self—reliance, are

nevertheless shadowed by a recognition of her emotional and sexual

repression. Lucy always dressed in black, considering bright colors

sinful. She bathed while wearing a shift. Her only emotional outlet

was singing Protestant hymns, which she did with a telling fervor;

through this hymn— singing, Le Sueur has said, her grandmother

made love to Jesus. Actually, the hymn—singing revealed many re-

pressed feelings, Le Sueur believes: "Only through these songs did I

know her terrible loneliness, her wish to die, her deep silence. Some-

times I heard her cry in the night, but I could not humiliate her

by going to comfort her. In the day there would be no sign" ("The

80 TELL ME A RIDDLE

Ancient People" 34).

Meridel was ten when her mother, Marian Wharton, left her

first husband, a Church of Christ minister. Le Sueur describes him

as 'a charming womanizer, the village sex symbol... a raconteur, a

vivant," as well as heavy-drinking, violent, and physically abusive. 2

Marian Wharton later married socialist Arthur Le Sueur. Meridel-

through her mother and stepfather, who were both active socialists

all their lives—was exposed to Populists, Wobblies, anarchists, union

organizers, and members of the Socialist Party, the Non-Partisan

League, and the Farmer-Labor Party; through her parents she met

luminaries such as Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berk-

man, John Reed, Mabel Dodge, Margaret Sanger, Theodore Dreiser,

and Carl Sandburg.

On the basis of her long, admirable life as a radical, writer,

and feminist, Le Sueur has become an emblematic figure, a "socialist

tribal mother," as one admirer puts it. 3 Le Sueur both enjoys this

status and finds it disturbing, as the following quote from my inter-

view of Le Sueur suggests: "I haven't really revealed the brutality

of...my own life, and I think the women's movement has helped me

to cover it up....Ms [Magazine, for example] wanted to present me

as [a] role model, [as a woman] who made it, *ho succeeded....They

don't tell the horrible violence of women's lives" (interview). When

Le Sueur speaks candidly about her life, she reveals details that add

rough edges to her public persona.

Constance Coiner 81

Le Sueur first publicly expressed her position on how radicals

create a literature of resistance in "The Fetish of Being Outside"

(New Masses, 1935). Written in the twilight of the CP's prole-

tarian period, this essay adopts the Party line that it is not only

possible but requisite for enlightened middle—class writers wholly to

leave their own class and to become ex officio members of the revo-

lutionary working class. "The Fetish" does not allow for oscillation

between complicity and critique with regard to class sympathies.

The language of "The Fetish" suggests rebirth, a baptismal cleans-

ing of original sin, a Kierkegaardian leap of faith: "You cannot leave

it by pieces or parts; it is a birth and you have to be born whole out

of it." The "creative artist" must be willing to "go all the way, with

full belief, into that darkness." The writer does "not react equiv-

ocally....Why want to be an outsider when...you admit sight of the

promised land..." (22-23).

The view expressed in "The Fetish" was popular among Party

members and sympathizers. Joseph Freeman's autobiography, An

American Testament, for example, attempted to show that an

intellectual committed to proletarian revolution could break irrevo-

cably with the middle class. Some of Le Sueur's "unofficial" literary

texts, however, contradict the position articulated in "The Fetish of

Being Outside." As a feminist within a male—dominated movement,

she herself experienced, and expressed in her literature, the con-

flicting impulses for which "The Fetish of Being Outside" does not

82 TELL ME A RIDDLE

allow. In two short stories which I've selected as examples— titled

"Annunciation" and "Corn Village"—Le Sueur frankly examines her

own experience with the dual vision and divided loyalty which "The

Fetish" condemns.

The short story "Annunciation" departs dramatically from or-

thodox proletarian realism. The title alludes to the angel Gabriel's

announcement to Mary that she will give birth to the Son of God

(Luke 1:26-38), and Le Sueur originally wrote the story in the form of

notes scrawled intermittently on scraps of paper to her first, unborn

child. Set in the Depression, this narrative prose poem represents

a pregnant woman's dream-like state of mind, imposing a theme

of fertility and regeneration upon a secondary theme of contrasting

deprivation. Because pregnancy, labor, the moment one's child is

born, and nurturing a newborn are among life's most profound ex-

periences, it is striking that they appear so rarely in literature. "An-

nunciation" 's lush, sensual, evocative language is hardly the stuff of

"official" proletarian literature:

I look at myself in the mirror....I look like a pale andshining pomegranate, hard and tight, and my skinshines like crystal with the veins showing beneathblue and distended.... I am a pomegranate hangingfrom an invisible tree with the juice and movementof seed within my hard skin.I dress slowly. I hate thesmell of clothes. I want to leave them off and justhang in the sun ripening....(86)

Constance Coiner 83

At the time Le Sueur wrote the story, pregnancy was consid-

ered unacceptable as a literary subject, as much by New Masses as

by the magazines that gave that reason for rejecting her manuscript

(Scribner's and Atlantic Monthly). A favorite Le Sueurian anec-

dote recalls here retort to the editor at Scribner's who, as he rejected

the story, suggested she write more like Hemingway: But "fishin',

fightin', and fuckin'," she quipped "are not the sum of my experi-

ence" (interview).

A second short story, "Corn Village," also examines Le Sueur's

own experience in an evocative, prose—poem narrative. Le Sueur

lived what she terms her "impressionable years" in Fort Scott,

Kansas, but "corn village" is obviously intended to represent many

midwestern small towns that experience harsh winters. The land-

scape is colorless and lifeless, "as if some malignant power were in

the air... the winter madness coming on, the winter death" (11).

Sexual and emotional repression are the human equivalent of the

barren, frozen landscape. In this rural community only the "foreign-

er? are "loose" and comfortable with their bodies, their sexuality;

only the "foreigners" are allowed to wear bright, expressive colors.

The Yankee bodies, in contrast, are "held taut for some unknown

fray with the devil or the world or the flesh" (15). Like Le Sueur's

grandmother, those at church revival have no love song other than

"Jesus, Lover of My Soul." Many of the corn villagers, like Le Sueur,

are closed, wary, emotionally deformed:

84 TELL ME A RIDDLE

Like many Americans, I will never recover from mysparse childhood in Kansas. The blackness, weightand terror of childhood in mid–America strike deepinto the stem of life. Like desert Bowers we learned tocrouch near the earth, fearful that we would die beforethe rains, cunning, waiting the season of good growth.Those who survived without psychic mutilation havea life of cunning, to keep the stem tight and spare,withholding the deep blossom, letting it sour ratherthan bloom and be blighted. (9)

First published by Scribner's Magazine, "Corn Village" ap-

pears in a collection of Le Sueur's work from the '30s issued by the

CP'a publishing organ, International Publishers (1940, 1977, 1979).

But "Corn Village" has little in common with proletarian realism or

reportage. In writing in 1930 about midwest farmers, Le Sueur was

not writing about workers considered by the Party during the Third

Period to be the key to revolution; as already noted, the Party gave

priority in this period to organizing efforts among workers in basic in-

dustry because of its assumed importance to the economy. In "Corn

Village" Le Sueur has consciously or unconsciously almost wholly

discarded the Party discourse. What I term "official optimism" and

its corollary "official certainty" —both considered stock ingredients

of proletarian literature—are noticeably absent in the text. Indeed,

mystery, uncertainty, and fear prevail. The text acknowledges the

complexity of "the people," who were often romanticized in Party—

and in Le Sueur's own—discourse.

Moreover, "Corn Village" is not constrained by the limited

Constance Coiner 85

understanding of ideology that characterizes much of the proletarian

realism and reportage. For example, in one of Le Sueur's best—known

pieces of '30s reportage, "I Was Marching," ideology is merely a

superstructure produced by an economic base, a false consciousness

obscuring society's "real" structures. In contrast, ideology pervades

"Corn Village," prefiguring the more current understanding of it as

the way in which we actively but unconsciously perform our roles

within the social totality. "Corn Village" supports Gramsci's notion

of dominance and subordination as a "whole lived social process"

saturating even the most private areas of our lives and consciousness.

If we accept Wendell Berry's definition of regionalism as "local life

aware of itself," "Corn Village" qualifies as an extraordinary piece

of regionalist writing precisely because Le Sueur adopts the double

consciousness and the oscillation between complicity and critique

that "The Fetish of Being Outside" condemns as neither possible

nor desirable for the radical writer (975). Le Sueur resides at once

within the corn village culture and outside it, negotiating marginality

and inclusion with divided loyalty and consciousness.

This text seems as authentic as it does, I suspect, largely be-

cause it examines Le Sueur's own experience. She chronicled the lives

of other oppressed people sometimes at the expense of exploring her

own oppression as a middle-class woman and a member of the male—

dominated CP. Yet we sense that in "Corn Village" Le Sueur's untold

story begins to emerge. Le Sueur's motives for adopting the work-

86 TELL ME A RIDDLE

ing class as her literary milieu were overdetermined: Surely a strong

sense of justice and collective responsibility sparked her concern; she

also disliked the strains of ennui, nihilism, and self—absorption in

twentieth—century American literature; and she was influenced by

the Party's focus during the Third Period on the proletariat as the

key to overturning capitalism and by its contradictory attitudes to-

ward women. Many CP leaders as well as many of the rank—and—file

did not consider middle—class women oppressed. When they spoke

of the "women problem," they meant "the toiling women and the

wives of toilers" (Shaffer 88). Perhaps we should also consider Le

Sueur's adopting the working class as partly an act of displacement.

Pressure from her family and the Party, as well as her own internal

coping mechanisms, may have made it difficult for her to write about

her own fear, anger, doubt, defeat. Yet in pieces such as "Annunci-

ation" and "Corn Village," an unofficial Meridel Le Sueur emerges,

moving toward the oracular voice she sought but did not achieve in

her "official" proletarian literature.

This complex intersection of feminism and the Old Left is also

refracted in illuminating ways in Tillie Olsen's literary texts. Olsen's

career, which spans over 50 years, includes two distant periods: the

year from 1933-34; and the year since 1953, when the youngest of

her four children entered school. Olsen's rebirth was not recorded,

Constance Coiner 87

although she has determined that she was born either near Mead or

in Omaha, Nebraska in either 1912 or 1913. Her parents, Samuel and

Ida Lerner, were Jewish working—class immigrants who had partici-

pated in the abortive 1905 Russian revolution. Although the family

was poor, the Lerners' active socialism added a rich dimension to

Tillie's childhood. In 1931, at 18, she joined the Young Communist

League, the youth organization of the Communist Party.

In 1933-34 Olsen wrote propaganda, not to fulfill specific

Party assignments but in a passionate, buoyant response to a work-

ing class that was on the move. However, as Deborah Rosenfelt

suggests, Olsen already felt during the '30s a conflict between two

kinds of writing: "the quick, fervent, impressionistic report from the

arena of struggle" and the careful rendering that "ironically would re-

quire for its full development a withdrawal from the struggle" (385).

This tension between discursive models is apparent in Olsen's most

important literary effort during the '30s, a short novel titled Yon-

nondio, which Olsen began in 1932 at age nineteen. She completed

the first four chapters, or almost half, of the novel before regretfully

abandoning it in 1937 after the birth of her second child.

In 1972-73, Olsen completed Yonnondio in what she terms

"arduous partnership" with "that long ago young writer." The first

four chapters, in final or near— final form, presented only minor

problems. The succeeding pages, which became four more chap-

ters,were increasingly difficult to reconstruct. "But it is all the old

88 TELL ME A RIDDLE

manuscripts—no rewriting, no new writing," a note appended to

the novel explains. Olsen felt she "didn't have any right" to revise

what "that long ago young writer" had intended to print. 4 Varying

tendencies coexist uneasily within Yonnondio—some elements ad-

here to the tenets of proletarian realism while other elements subvert

them. These conflicting tendencies hint not only at Olsen's increas-

ing ambivalence about "the Party aesthetic" but also at fundamental

problems within the '30s CP and orthodox Marxism, itself.

Yonnondio confronts one of the differences within the work-

ing class that the '30s CP minimized—the divisive effects of sexism.

At a time when Avram Landry, representing the CP leadership, de-

nied "any conceivable antagonism" between working-class women

and men, the novel implicitly emphasizes the way in which the sex-

ual division of labor militates against working-class unity (Shaffer

86). The novel depicts Jim and Anna Holbrook taunting one another

and his abandoning the family for days at a time; Jim "struck Anna

too often to remember," and, at one point, rapes her while their

young daughter listens in terror (15).

Engles argued that the husband "is the bourgeois, [while] the

wife represents the proletariat" (744). This relationship of domi-

nation/subjection provides a structural basis for animosity rather

than mutual understanding and solidarity within the working class.

Indeed, Jim Holbrook's perception of "wife" hardly includes a no-

tion of her as political comrade, coequal in struggle. Jim vents his

•

Constance Coiner 89

rage at Anna rather than at his capitalist boss. As the other side

of this perverse equation, Anna occasionally reduces Jim to a mere

breadwinner, blaming him for not adequately supporting the family,

a responsibility both of them assume is primarily, if not exclusively,

his. Such opposition makes class camaraderie problematic at best,

and the Party minimized the consequences of the sexual division of

labor at some cost.

Since tensions between Anna and Jim ease considerably during

their one brief period of relative prosperity, Yonnondio implies that

gender–based antagonisms are related in a simple cause–and–effect

way to economic oppression. Indeed, according to the prevailing view

of the '30s Party members, a socialist revolution would sweep away

sexual oppression in its wake. For example, one Daily Worker

headline proclaimed, in reference to the Soviet Union: "AR [Sex]

Inequality Abolished by the October Revolution." Party women

tended to defer their hopes for a feminist future. Nevertheless, Yon-

nondio provides evidence that the social construction of gender is

an entrenched, unconsciously reproduced phenomenon that will over-

turn itself simply by "tailing" a transformation in economic relations.

Olsen wrote Yonnondio over 30 years before the existence of

the women's movement that would welcome its publication in 1974.

Like Le Sueur's "unofficial" texts, the novel emphasized some of the

physiological events that shape women's live—pregnancy, childbirth,

miscarriage, battery, and rape—at a time when these topics seldom

90 TELL ME A RIDDLE

appeared in literature. Moreover, Olsen's unsentimental presenta-

tion of institutionalized motherhood forced on the American literary

canon a subject hitherto forbidden except in idealized form.

Yonnondio's critique of capitalism is robust, full-blown. Its

prescient questioning of some elements of orthodox Marxism—such

as productivism and its concomitant privileging of the industrial

worker; the separation of public and private spheres; the subordi-

nation of gender-related issues to those of class—may be only half-

realized, but it is significant, nevertheless. In Yonnondio Olsen

strains away from her early '30s "of ficial" proletarian literature.

"Reader, it was not to have ended here," Olsen laments in the note

appended to the unfinished novel when it finally appeared in print.

On the contrary, in Yonnondio Olsen has written "beyond the end-

ing." 5

Le Sueur and Olsen's texts not only resist bourgeois culture

but also provide a wedge into problems that have historically plagued

the Left. They foreshadow, if only in a muted, provisional sense,

questions about Marxism and Leninism that theorists, including

feminists, have more recently and more explicitly raised. Politically

and culturally, Le Sueur and Olsen's texts represent what Raymond

Williams describes as a "pre-emergence," active and pressing but

not yet fully articulated

Constance Coiner 91

Their texts resist, for example, orthodox Marxism's reduction

of the social terrain's heterogeneity to centers and margins, such as

males in the industrial workplace and women in the domestic sphere.

At a time when the "proper" subjects and settings of working—class

literature were factory workers waging strikes, Yonnondlo, for ex-

ample, focused largely on working—class familial relations and con-

cluded with a baby realizing her power by gleefully banging a fruit—

jar lid. The Left has created and ignored such "margins" at great

cost, failing to attract numbers to its ranks partly because it has

both feared and trivialized people's emotional needs. Le Sueur criti-

cized this dread of intimacy in "Corn Village." She was first exposed

to a strain of Protestant asceticism through her stern grandmother.

And the inhabitants of the rural community in which Le Sueur grew

up were similarly closed, wary, emotionally deformed. But to a de-

gree this asceticism also marked the Communist Party, which did

not resist the legacy from Western metaphysics that falsely sepa-

rates the emotional "realm" from rational intelligence. Yet Le Sueur

and Olsen's heterodox texts treat these categories as fundamentally

political, dissolving the artificial distinction between public and pri-

vate, between Party line and personal experience, between political

consciousness and emotional need.

Le Sueur and Olsen asserted their difference within the forced

unity and closure of not only the dominant culture but also an

androcentric Communist Left, prefiguring a younger generation of

92 TELL ME A RIDDLE

feminists. Against the transcendent Party, Le Sueur and Olsen as-

serted the importance of their own concrete experience, an experi-

ence of domination and exploitation which Leninist theory dimin-

ishes. They implied that "the personal is political" long before that

phrase became a household slogan among younger feminists. By

now old news, this slogan is nevertheless still timely. Although it

has become "rather an embarrassment as if everyone has heard it

all before...hearing and doing are different matters. The questions

remain" (Rowbotham 141).

One of these remaining questions—responsibility for children-

may be the crucible of the women's movement. This issue has

not been a priority for the movement because during the '60s and

70's many feminists forewent or delayed childrearing. With the '80s

baby boom, however, even the women whom the movement has most

helped to advance, its educated, professional elite, have with a sense

of deja vu felt that old shock of sudden recognition, that familiar

"dick": equal professional opportunity collapses around the issue of

who will take care of the kids. Tillie Olsen has pioneered in this

area as has no other American writer: "Tell Me a Riddle" and Si-

lences are virtually unique for their uncompromising look at the

anguish of women who must choose between having children and

the need to carry on other serious work. Olsen and Le Sueur's '30s

literature illuminates the cracks in an idealized, good-housekeeping

Comrade/Wife, a creature not unrelated to today's mythic Super-

Constance Coiner 93

woman, who, politically mainstream or Left, can presumably "do it

all." That more women than men have valued Le Sueur and Olsen's

iconoclasm reminds us that textual meaning, rather than being ab-

solute, is a consequence of a reader's being in a particular situation

in the world. The CP's work among women in the '30s should be

carefully evaluated as part of the struggle for women's liberation

in the U.S. Margaret Cowl, head of the CP Women's Commission

during the '30s, concluded in 1974 that Party leadership had paid

only lip service to women's issues during the '30s; that mass women's

movements were not genuinely accepted as part of the U.S. working-

Class movement; and that "male supremacy" played a role in keeping

Party women in their place (Ware 122). Elsa Dixler concludes that

women's place was "on the picket line—and in the home" (127).

But Peggy Dennis, for 50 years an active Party member, and the

widow of Party leader Eugene Dennis, reflects the views of Olsen

and Le Sueur, when she summarizes the contradictory experience of

Party women: "Male Communists often responded to discussions of

the 'woman question' with derision or condescension, but there were

few other organizations in the country at the time in which women

would even consider it their right to challenge such attitudes" (Is-

Berman 141). Many women developed an awareness of their own

potential, a sense of collectivity, and an understanding of America's

social system through Party-related activities. That Party leader-

ship was overwhelmingly male and that its bureaucracy functioned

94 TELL ME A RIDDLE

undemocratically "from the top down" is a matter of record. But the

history of the rank-and-file, including its women, has yet to be thor-

oughly explored. The biographies and literary texts of Le Sueur and

Olsen, which speak to the contradictory experience of women within

the Communist Left, comprise an important part of that history.

The "riddle" which Le Sueur and Olsen's work challenges us to

engage requires that we consider political activity as something un-

dertaken not only within a kaleidoscopic social field but also within

"the fibres of the self and in the hard practical substance of effective

and continuing relationships" (Williams 212). Creating a counter-

hegemony by connecting many different forms of struggle, including

those not primarily "public" and "economic," leads to a more pro-

found and compelling sense of revolutionary activity.

A longer version of this essay appears in Politics of Literature—

toward the 1990a, edited by Lennard J. Davis and Bella Mirabella

(Columbia University Press, 1989). This essay is also part of Prof.

Coiner's book about women writers at the intersection of U.S. fem-

inism and the Old Left, forthcoming from Oxford University Press

(New York).

I n •

Constance Coiner 95

NOTES

I see Lauter, "Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American

Literary Canon: A Case Study for the Twenties." Feminist

Studies 9.3 (Fall 1983): 435-63.

2 Recorded interview of Meridel Le Sueur by Constance Coiner,

26 March 1985, in Los Angeles. Subsequent references to this

interview will be made parenthetically in the text with the word

"interview."

3 This term appeared in "Meridel Le Sueur," a poem by Will In-

man included in an unpaginated anthology commemorating Le

Sueur's eightieth birthday, We Sing our Struggle: A Trib-

ute to US All for Meridel Le Sueur. Ed.Mary McAnally.

Tulsa: Cardinal Press, 1982.

Debora Rosenfelt's interview of Tillie Olsen, 20-21 December

1980, San Francisco and Santa Cruz

5 This phrase and concept are borrowed from Writing Beyond

Ending, by Rachel Blau Duplessis, who defines "writing be-

yond ending" as "the invention of strategies that sever the nar-

rative from formerly conventional structures of fiction and con-

sciousness about women" (x). However, I believe "strain away

from" is often more accurate than "sever."

96 TELL ME A RIDDLE

Works Cited

Berry, Wendell. "The Regional Motive." Southern Review (Oc-tober 1970): 972-977.

Dixler, Elsa Jane. "The Woman Question: Women and the Ameri-can Communist Party, 1929-1941." Diss. Yale U. 1974.

Duplessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending. Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of Family, Private Property,and State. Excerpted in The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed.Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978 ed. 734-59.

Gold, Michael. "America Needs a Critic." New Masses (Oct.1926): 7-9.

Hedges, Elaine. Introduction. Ripening: Selected Work, 1927-1980. By Meridel Le Sueur. Old Westbury: The FeministPress, 1982. 1-28.

Isserman, Maurice. Which Side Were You On? The Ameri-can Communist Party During the Second World War.Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1982.

Le Sueur, Meridel. "The Ancient People and Newly Come." Grow-ing Up in Minnesota: Ten Writers Remember TheirChildhoods. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota P, 1976. 17-46.

—. "Annunciation." Salute to Spring. 1940. New York: Interna-tional, 1977. 75-89.

—."Corn Village."—."The Fetish of Being Outside." New Masses 26 (Feb.. 1935):

22-23.Personal interview conducted by Constance Coiner. 26 March

1985.Olsen, Tillie. Personal interview conducted by Deborah Rosenfelt.

20 December 1980.—. Silences. New York: Dell, 1978.

Yonnondio: From the Thirties. New York: Dell, 1974.Rosenfelt, Deborah. "From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radi-

cal Tradition." Feminist Studies 7 (Fall 1981): 371-406.

Constance Coiner 97

Rowbotham, Sheila, Lyn Segal and Hilary Wainwright. Beyond theFragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism.1979. Boston: Alyson, 1981.

Shaffer, Robert. "Women and the Communist Party, USA, 1930-1940." Socialist Review May-June 1979: 73- 118.

Strom, Sharon Hartman. "Challenging 'Woman's Place': Femi-nism, the Left, and Industrial Unionism in the 1930s." Fem-inist Studies 9 (Summer 1983): 359-386.

Ware, Susan. Holding Their Own: American Women in the1930s. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: OxfordUP, 1977.

DEPRESSION TORUSWELLESLEY LIFE

Decrease In Thoughtlessnessand Settishriess In $ Years

Noted Amm WIAMIS.

PRACTICAL RELIGION GAINS

Snowy Fide Rim le 'SadaCanWilliweesso• With New

Marinas* No Wield Need.

*P.11.1 00 Ile new eweWiLLIWCZY. Now.. Jan. Ig-ite roans

.1 depression bare

wowed • eonsiduable demon latbonglillowneas mid selfishnessamong stadonts of Waage,College, asearding to Stella Mew,

u, wawa! weretss7 of WeCloriallan Awanlation.

In . annoy al opeaalloallea." or Is tiw taw Wellylep mawde.. Iliwisier dates that "bedal sasoslewanwt has rises I.

Meal mar es • week of Usedeprow3ea.

cad thal, on tb• erholitdents are be wars aye in lhoweds arte world than wens slytehoweltWiala ia INI" she when.

113 teak I as sals la saint thatas awing and 60.01=1.3 1"41008haw wine to tho two It the wedeon pears Us weal totem* lasolving Os has certainly kinerwril. Sad I Wise* that Wswamis girl lobo beimWellesley today is =rs.pregosellto eawr no 001011•31 world themwas Ohs wafts.* al NW."

Alligagh hilatlealg fewer ghlstea erasing WNW,. tear..061.Wady nerfiew. lassfinds a• Imam In thew Star-whs. himeds1 moles. Yew volun-teer Wei ils• W Enid

line/oW. madpe On thaWWI et Ike realm mob

eawaft sall sostagag W

tindi la hospital awl haaw

Batchelor. Sander New.. Jan. Y, 1934

We Planned It That Way

New York Ti... Jan. 13, 1966